Dr. Bedics earned his BA in Psychology from The Pennsylvania State University, his MS in Clinical Psychology from the University of Utah, and his PhD in Clinical Psychology from Fuller Graduate School of Psychology in Pasadena, CA. He completed his clinical internship at the Portland VA Medical Center and a two-year postdoctoral fellowship at the Evidence-Based Treatment Center of Seattle, where he specialized in dialectical behavior therapy (DBT). Dr. Bedics is a Professor at California Lutheran University (CLU) in Thousand Oaks, California and serves as the Director of the MS in Clinical Psychology Program. He teaches courses in Behavioral Clinical Methods, DBT Basics, Suicide Assessment and Risk Management, Exploratory Data Analysis and Visualization using R, and Mindfulness. He also directs the DBT Training Specialization in CLU’s doctoral program. Dr. Bedics is a licensed clinical psychologist in the state of California and is board certified in Behavioral and Cognitive Psychology by the American Board of Professional Psychology (ABPP). Dr. Bedics’ clinical and research expertise centers on DBT and the treatment of suicidal behavior. He had the unique privilege of working closely with the developer of DBT, Dr. Marsha Linehan, as both a clinician and researcher. In collaboration with Dr. Linehan, he published research on the therapeutic relationship during DBT and examined how the interpersonal relationship between the therapist and client can impact outcome. He continued this line of work at the UCLA School of Medicine, where he served as a therapist and researcher on the largest randomized controlled trial of DBT for self- harming and suicidal adolescents (Collaborative Adolescent Research on Emotions and Suicide; CARES). Dr. Bedics is the editor of the Handbook of Dialectical Behavior Therapy: Theory, Research, and Evaluation, published by Academic Press. As the Science and Scholarship Domain Representative on the Division 29 Board of Directors, Dr. Bedics advocates for open science practices that strengthen the reproducibility, integrity, and clinical relevance of psychotherapy research.
Please feel free to contact Dr. Bedics with any questions at jbedics@callutheran.edu
